Does our perception of a painting rely on the electricity of human encounter?
From the Summer 2015 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.
Yes...
Paintings can only reveal themselves if we commune with them in person, argues artist Emyr Williams.
Joan Miró once said of Courbet’s painting, A Burial at Ornans (1849-50), “You can feel its power with your back turned to it.” As a schoolboy this remark had intrigued me, my sole reference for the Courbet being a small reproduction in a book. It was only when I saw the painting as an art student that I realised what had so overwhelmed Miró: the mourners are life-size. The sheer scale and ambition of this work is staggering. Conversely, the jewel-like qualities of a small Manet flower painting are dazzling in their modesty. A few years ago I had a visceral need to see and feel the scale of the huge Delacroix works in the Louvre. No other experience of them would do; I simply had to go to Paris.
If you have ever watched a person looking at a painting, it is noticeable how mobile they are, often shifting their weight, or tilting their heads, as if attempting to locate something. Active looking is very physical, yet more paintings are probably seen nowadays digitally than “in the flesh”. For many, the convenience of a screen image suffices. Apologists will argue, convincingly, that our interaction with the virtual is an inevitable point on the trajectory of our developing human intelligence and culture.
Indeed, virtual realities are vitally useful in numerous disciplines – surgery springs to mind immediately. But is there a dehumanising flipside to this technological revolution? Are we disconnecting ourselves from the handmade? Are thousands of years of evolution culminating in our opposing thumbs’ ability to screen swipe?
I believe a painting cannot fulfil itself as “Art” unless one really sees it in person. Reproductions can be an enticing reference or an aide-memoir, yet the electricity of the encounter is missing. A real painting possesses an inherent plasticity formed through human endeavour; it provides us with a haptic sensation of constructed space. Furthermore, we often return to seemingly familiar works only to discover new and unforeseen qualities in them. This regeneration can only happen when our eyes apprehend the surface. The surface: that magical membrane, the point at which the paint stops and the air begins.
In this digital age, painters can ask themselves a simple, significant question: what can I achieve in this medium that I cannot do more effectively in another? As an abstract painter I now feel an urgency to make highly spatial paintings through a very specific control of colour and surface. Colour for me is completely dependent upon surface to make it both physically and emotionally expressive. I am always astonished at how a seemingly innocuous material such as paint achieves such amazing outcomes when handled sensitively. The “coloured glues” of paint, when viewed in reality rather than reproduction, can conjure up wonderful luminous spaces that condense and amplify the sensations we have of seeing and perceiving the world.
A painting for me should aspire to these heightened states of visual stimulation, rather than display itself as a form of entertainment or rely on extrinsic narratives, which other media can employ more readily. Painting needs to seek out more profound visual territory to explore. In any quest to advance painting, artists can learn illuminating lessons from the past. Matisse’s phosphorescent Venice interiors; Cézanne’s revolutionary landscapes; Constable’s daring spatial structures; Titian’s unerringly inventive compositions: all these feel more relevant than ever when seen in the flesh.
Great paintings like these provide a communion that is timeless. The transmitted backlight of a screen or the glossily inked page of a magazine homogenises our spatial perceptions and transforms “looking” into “reading.” To engage fully with a painting, we need to see its space… in its space. If we forsake opportunities to absorb ourselves in art in this way, we will surely erode one of the more remarkable abilities of our species.